Around 60 percent of companies were able to assess security risks in cloud environments, down 7 points compared to last year. Mobile devices scored at 57 percent, down by 8 percentage points compared to last year.

Overall, the confidence levels of security professionals that their cyber defenses were meeting expectations dropped from 76 percent last year to 70 percent in this year's survey, according to the report, which was produced by Columbia, Md.-based Tenable Network Security with research by CyberEdge Group.

The largest single drop was in the confidence in the security of web applications, down 18 points from 80 percent last year to 62 percent today.

Respondents also reported lower confidence in their ability to convey risks to executives and board members, down 3 percentage points from 83 percent last year to 80 percent today.

On a positive note, they were more confident about their ability to manage security effectiveness, up by 2 points from 81 to 83 percent.

Tenable strategist Cris Thomas said that he was surprised by the results.

"It would be my assumption that as we go through time and work with these technologies more and more we get more comfortable with them," he said. "Our ability to assess the risk and mitigate those threats should become greater over time. But the numbers aren't showing that. The numbers are showing a decrease over last year, and I really don't have an explanation of that."

Take cloud services for example, he said. Companies are using more and more cloud services and cloud infrastructure.

He suggested that security pros might be becoming more aware of cybersecurity risks than they were before.

"Maybe we're just realizing what we don't know, and that there's a bigger security concern than we though there was," he said. "We're just starting to understand how complex the security is with cloud."

Similarly, mobile should be an old story, he said.

"We've had mobile devices for a while," he said. "This isn't something new and we think we'd have an understanding and grasp of the security issues. So I would expect this score to go up, but instead we had a decrease."